Mobile network operators would like to offer controlled wireless access based on WLAN/IEEE802.11 technology to establish a secondary wireless access to increase capacity and coverage of their mobile networks in a cost efficient way. A corresponding solution may also be used by broadband or wireless fidelity (WiFi) operators to establish public WiFi access.
A main problem of establishing operator controlled WiFi access (access that can be used by other customers of the operator than the site owner) is the cost for establishing and operating the infrastructure, i.e. installing WiFi access points (APs), connecting the APs to the back end system and providing the power source for the WiFi APs.
Cost reduction is possible by sharing the infrastructure with other users. When sharing infrastructure with multiple site owners the scalability of the solution becomes a huge issue because individual agreements with thousands/millions of partners are a huge effort and may cause many complications, as site owners usually follow their own requirements. So far, such infrastructure sharing was only commercially feasible with huge cooperations running their enterprise networks in some uniform way.
Since there is no real alternative solution, operators are relying so far on own installations (expensive) or on mutual agreements with the site owners to leverage the installations of the site owners requiring comprehensive technical agreements to allow secondary usage.
Sometimes, site owners hesitate to allow a secondary usage of their infrastructure because of concerns with respect to security or flexibility to configure their network according to their own needs.